A House for Hank: Psycho Stacy

Someday I’ll turn this search for a “House for Hank” into a children’s book when Hank and I finally live a grown-up life and own a house.  And we’ll have grown-up Pottery Barn/Crate & Barrel furniture.  But for the time being…the search, the resale shops, and the nomadism continues.  Let me state that I HATE moving.  I hate the ENTIRE process.  I hate everything about moving including figuring out where you are moving to in the first place.  I can muster up the energy for anything and everything else in this world EXCEPT for moving.  I am not a procrastinator in any other arena…except for this magical one.  If you’ve ever made 2 full-house moves in 6 weeks, you understand where I’m coming from.  And I’m sure some people have made even more than that in shorter amounts of time.  This is not a pissing contest.  But I might appreciate your humorous stories.

I had decided that while living with my brother this past year had been a blast, it was time to move out of the apartment complex and find a yard for my dog Hank Spank.  I had also been warned by a very shrewd person that the Houston housing market (especially for renting) was brutal, and I absolutely should NOT put the search off until the last minute.  Good advice to heed.  And after a full month of searching, working with agents, and driving all over town viewing different houses, I thought I’d finally found our dream home….dream rental home.  And I’d done it all by myself….via inquiring about that hand-written sign I’d seen on the side of the road on my way home from swim practice one morning.  Hmmm.  It was perfect: central downtown location near Rice University, a big backyard, a quaint little fireplace, 2 bedrooms, 2 full baths, a kitchen, living room, dining room, front porch, and even hard-wood floors.  And all of this for the price of $800.00 per month.  I thought I’d struck gold, literally.  With those amenities and that location…I should have been paying $1200-1400 per month.  The only tiny little issue was that this wasn’t really a full home all to myself…I had a duplex neighbor who shared half my house.  Yes, it was a home in my mind…with just a common wall.  Let me introduce Psycho Stacy.  There were tell-tale signs to begin with…I just tend to view my glasses ¾ full and often put blinders on.  For instance, my future landlord did not email or fax, he was not a real-estate agent, had me sign a hand-written leasing contract, the place had window units for A.C., the entire front walk foundation was cracked, there were electrical wires duct-taped to the side of the house, it was a gas house, the windows were permanently fixed/sealed to not be able to open, there were no smoke detectors or a fire extinguisher on the premises, and my new neighbor claimed my landlord was female-hating and the radical type of Muslim who “blew stuff up” (in her own eloquent words).  These were all minor details I conveniently did not take notice of until my friendly, alcoholic, dog-hating, 46-year old, prostitute neighbor pointed them out….after I moved in and she demanded I NEVER wear shoes in the house as she slept all day long and could hear every creaky footstep.  As an aside: I ended up with quite a few new pairs of stilettos and a very loud radio before World War III ceased.  And I’m not being caddy.  Psycho Stacy was truly a prostitute as when I asked my landlord how he’d like me to pay him my rent…he remarked it didn’t matter as Stacy had 3 different men on alternating months take care of hers.  Stacy also shared with me the 100% accurate and true information of the previous murder of 3 people in my house before I moved in.  The incident involved a jealous ex-boyfriend (the killer), a pregnant woman, the unborn child, and the current boyfriend…all being shot in my front yard before the killer fled to the woods and committed suicide.  Huh.  But that wasn’t even the kicker.  The actual catalyst to the War centered on the first morning I left Hank Spank at home while I went to work.  By the time I came out of my morning routine of 4-6 surgeries, Psycho Stacy had left 4 progressively hysterical  voice messages for me on my cell phone demanding either I get rid of my dog or I move out as she couldn’t sleep and my dog was barking.  Funny, I’d been living in an apartment complex for 1 year without a single barking dog complaint.  I was working 40 minutes from my house at the time, and going home at lunch was not an option.  So I called my landlord to go over to my place and find out what the problem was.  I then met him at 7:30pm that night after work to survey the scene.  He confirmed that my little dog was hardly making a peep, but any time he even breathed, the Wicked Witch of the West went ape-sh*t on the wall.  I ran inside to rescue little Hank only to find him cowering in a corner, shaking, with urine all around and on himself out of fright.  It BROKE my heart.  I cannot even imagine the mental abuse he went through that day.  At this point I lost my cool (I’m quite a protective Mother Hen sometimes), and subsequently beat the sh*t out of her front door demanding she show her face to me, grow-up, and stop being an alcoholic, prostitute.  She wouldn’t come to the door, obviously.  So my landlord told me to take the dog somewhere temporarily (which involved me taking a day to drive Hank to my parents’ house in Dallas), and then he would evict her.  Superb idea as the next night involved me calling the police on her and going to stay at a hotel room at 3am because my landlord told her I was the reason he was evicting her.  That next night I was introduced to multiple voice and personalities Stacy.  She began with beating on the walls and crying out in a small child’s voice for her mommy to stop hitting her.  Then she dropped heavy furniture on the wood floors that I don’t even know how she lifted in the first place.  Then she screamed out that she lived next to a veterinarian who enjoyed killing animals for fun and described ways this would happen.  And that cycle repeated over and over but louder each time.  I’m pretty convinced now I was actually living in a satanic house.  I started crying, didn’t know what to do, it was 2 am at that point, I had surgeries to perform in the early morning, and so I ended up calling the police on her.  And my knights in shining armor arrived 1 hour later to tell me their hands were tied as we lived on the same property.  They suggested I go to a hotel room.  Which I did.  The best part about all of this involved the fact that I was leaving to run my marathon in Greece in 1 week.  When it rains, it pours.  And oh by the way, I was in the middle of two new hospital changes at work.

So I spent my lunches finding a place to move to, ASAP, out in Cypress where my permanent hospital location was.  That way I could go home at lunch to play with Hank, etc.  Miraculously, I immediately found something on har.com, 1^st place I looked at, the price was decent, it backed up to a horse farm, had all of the things I needed with the added bonus of a real-estate agent who lived in this century and could e-mail and fax, included a real-typed contract, and safety precautions in the house.  The next part, breaking my contract with the old landlord wasn’t too difficult but collecting my deposit money back was an entirely different story.  I slept 3 nights in the demon house out of the entire 6 weeks I paid rent there, which my landlord knew.  Yet, the world’s best landlord met and avoided giving me the deposit check twice with stories such as I don’t own a checkbook to finally going to the bank and getting a checkbook to people broke into my house this week, tied up my family, and stole my checkbook.  It was a fantastic process.  And after threatening to sue (totally embraced my Americanism), he eventually found his checkbook he thought the home-invaders stole and paid up.  Literally people, I wasn’t even blinking an eye at this point, nothing about this was too outlandish.  After the fact, satanic Stacy continued to call and leave voice messages until I blocked her number.

But it all works out in the end, right?  Well, I am currently in Vegas for a veterinary conference.  My new neighbors have dogs, seem like human beings, are not the spawn of Satan, and have normal daylight-hour jobs.  But the water faucets and ceiling were leaking at first.  And right before leaving for Vegas, my next door neighbor ran out of her house barefoot with a baby, screaming at somebody back inside the house to “not ever touch her or the baby again”.  The police arrived and Jamaal was asked if he was aware of the 4 warrants out for his arrest.  I got in the car to drive to Dallas with my dog.  In true “Gone with the Wind” fashion, I’ll just think about that tomorrow.  Apparently I have this incredible propensity for picking out sh*t-holes to dwell in.  So while the situation seems to have improved…the search for the “House for Hank” undoubtedly and unceasingly continues….